Goodbye Lineone (aka Tiscali)

Here’s a story that’s rather relevant to this weblog: BBC NEWS | Business | Tiscali back in the red. As the BBC story says:

Tiscali cut its sales forecast for this year to 800m euros, down from 1bn euros, after losing almost half a million subscribers in April, May and June.

Earlier this month Tiscali blocked the transferring of files on all carriers except their own dial-up and broadband connections. This is why my weblog stagnated in August. Tiscali barred Blogger.com from transferring any files, so nothing I wrote appeared on my site.

Tiscali has initiated this policy in the hope of forcing its customers to use its carriers and thereby generate revenue via the telephone. Well, not me. I refuse to pay for Internet telephone calls, and so have purchased web space elsewhere. In fact, if you’re reading this post I have already moved my website from Lineone (a part of Tiscali) to my own domain, and so contributed my part to Tiscali’s decline. Not only will this policy fail to increase revenue, it will drive viewers away, which will simply worsen the decline in advertising revenue. Goodbye and good riddance!